


Only slightly soiled

by Lilliburlero



Series: Slightly soiled [1]
Category: Clara Batchelor Trilogy - Antonia White, David Blaize - E. F. Benson, Purposes of Love - Mary Renault, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Ableist Language, Consent Issues, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Genderqueer Character, M/M, Minor Character Death, Ontological status of medial consonants, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sex Work, Speculation about Ralph's L, Stealth RPF, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 18:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2662331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A promising applicant turns down a place to read Geography at King's. A couple of months later, the Admissions Tutor meets him again in rather different circumstances.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: sex work, mentions of underage sex, mention of consent issues, off-stage minor character death, brief mention of animal sacrifice (in a literary allusion), period-typical attitudes to gender, disability, sexuality and race; language appropriate thereto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only slightly soiled

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



> Naraht requested Ralph going up for his interview, or his life between school and finding a ship. I have managed in this fic to do more or less neither.
> 
> *
> 
> With thanks to [ Makioka](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/pseuds/Makioka).

The Admissions Tutor put down the letter after reading a few sentences. Anodynes were necessary to proceed. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, withdrew the bottle of Irish whiskey that he kept for this purpose alone and dosed his cooling coffee with it, then lit a cigarette. He’d had his suspicions since receiving the candidate’s own laconic letter and the headmaster’s equally terse confirmation, but he had resolutely posited in their place a mother’s nervous or a father’s financial collapse. And in such harmless self-deceit he might have continued were it not for the prurience of schoolmasters.  

It was an exhaustive account. Not for this correspondent the virile tact which had characterised a letter on a similar subject which the Admissions Tutor had received when he was himself a schoolboy. Modernity and psychology had intervened, irrevocably. He gulped the weak, chill, whiskified brew, and read on in increasing dismay. The candidate’s trespass had been the Admissions Tutor’s own—not just in general, but in perverse particular—and had it not been for a saving love, his fate might have been his too. Unexpiated guilt nestled there: it stirred; he smothered it, stubbing his cigarette. 

The letter was a contemptible liberty undertaken on the barest of acquaintance—he had a dim recollection of an ovine face at drinks after last year's Rede lecture.  It could not be dignified with a response and should not be with a flame, but he nonetheless lumbered into the lavatory adjacent to his set and, applying a match, dropped the two densely written foolscap pages over the sink. He remembered that he was meeting the young Geography Fellow for luncheon today. He sighed: the curious circumstance of this year’s most memorable and promising applicant in the Fellow’s subject having brusquely repudiated a place and an exhibition accepted months before could not but arise in conversation.

The Fellow’s mind, like his person well-scrubbed and rounded, ran fortunately straight to pecuniary misfortune.

‘One’s fearfully keen side is disappointed, of course,’ he said candidly, ‘he would have been rather a _bracing_ presence in supervisions.’  

‘And somewhat unsettling,’ remarked the Admissions Tutor, ‘to the side that’s looking forward to nothing more than six o’clock and sherry?’

‘Quite. Damnable shame for the boy, condemned to clerking at three pounds a week or something.’

The Admissions Tutor smiled at his companion’s delightful normality—how very _relaxing_ it must be, to be able to see _that_ candidate’s incandescent self-delight: febrile, rarefied and perilous, like ethanol aflame, merely in terms of the pedagogical equivalent of a day-trip to Skegness—and changed the subject.

*

When David was out of town, Frank usually spent his weekends in college. But this week, so close to the beginning of Michaelmas term, the prospect of forty-eight hours of scholarship and solitude seemed frowsty and sour, and weekend society in college at the fag-end of the vac was intolerable: for one thing, one was sure to encounter the Provost and what the Provost had said to Lytton Strachey. He rang Nell Crayshaw and accepted her invitation for Saturday night.

He took a mid-afternoon train to town, so as to spend an evening with David before his departure for Wade Abbas, where Margery lived with her husband, who was choirmaster and organist at the Minster there, and thence for Truro and the retired Dean.  Frank regretted that the ambiguous position of _great friend_ did not allow in one’s forties the frequent intimacy permitted in one’s teens and twenties, for following his mother’s remarriage and removal to her native France he had no family to speak of in England, and he was fond of Margery and devoted to David’s father. 

David took him to _Richard of Bordeaux_ , which was pronounced _ripping_ over the sandwiches that tradition had rendered mandatory. In _ripping_ Frank concurred; they argued heartily _over in its way every bit as good as Shakespeare_. David said, his lips twitching, that he believed the historical Richard was at least as fond of one or two other people as the play suggested he was of Queen Anne; Frank gravely pointed out that he had, in an agony of grief, ordered the palace at which she died demolished after her death.  Yes, David said, but that was surely _hygiene_ , and they dissolved into giggles.

After David’s departure on Saturday morning Frank swam at the Bath Club; water was kind to his stiff left leg. His physique no longer had proportion to recommend it: the exercise he was capable of over-developed the upper body, and age had accelerated a tendency to stockiness, but flabbiness and waste had largely been averted. The admiring glances he garnered had now, however, a lowering quality: they said _not bad for his age_ , and _No, he’s lame_ , _O_. Frank, possessed equally of personal vanity and a sense of humour about it, snorted quietly: to imagine himself the Gerty MacDowell of 34 Dover Street was both self-revealing and probably self-aggrandising. In a lavatory cubicle he took Bloom’s part, and tried not to feel too shabby about it.

Nell’s Chelsea conglomeration—two studios knocked through into a living space—was as black as Dis; through one room ran a Phleglethon of candlelight, at considerable hazard to the fringed draperies and floor-cushions, not to mention the women’s chiffons and ninons; in one adjacent dancers shimmied to jazz played on an stripped-down upright; in the kitchen lay a buffet that looked as if harpies had been at it. To conclude from the variety of styles of dress on display that no code of dress obtained would be grave error; the code was more intricate than any mandated by mere conformism: dinner dress was expected of Frank, but would have been a gross gaffe on the poet in whose worn corduroy the Andean explorer would not have been found dead, while the astronomer in green high-drape slacks and yellow silk blouse would rather ride naked through the streets than present herself in the leotard, fringed shawl and wrap-around skirt belonging to the dancer.

Nell, handsome in a man-tailored coat and cowboy tie, embraced Frank warmly, remarking that they should be seeing a great deal more of him than they were. 

‘Fettered by paper-chains. But how are you?’

‘A perfectly compromised—what is David’s glorious word?— _cocoon_ , these days.  But it pays.’

‘I saw the _Vogue_ spread—insofar as I’m any judge, it seemed something rather out of the ordinary.’

‘ _Ghastly_ people. You should hear the things they say. I had a vivid insight into the lives of upper servants — no, mustn’t grumble. I’m enchanted, by the way, at the notion that there is a fusty kiosk on Kings Parade with the American glossies all earmarked for Maddox, F.X.’ She flicked his nose.

‘Piffle. The SCR has a sub. But I must say hullo to Clara—’

‘You’ll have a job.  She’s doing the aunt-routine in West Cork.’

‘Goodness, are Richard and Kathleen’s infants old enough for aunt-routines?’

‘Dickie’s nine, would you believe—’

‘Past time we should introduce him to McTurk, don’t you think?’ said Clive Heron, materialising, pale and silent as a pince-nez-wearing swan, behind Nell.

‘I think Ireland’s seen enough sectarian conflagration for this century, my dear.’ 

‘We in the Home Office must make our entertainment where we can. Come, I’ll get you a drink.’  Clive took Frank’s arm; the slight constraint that existed between them they obviated with an elaborate gallantry in which Frank’s part was the feminine—he could imagine no other man on earth from whom he should accept such treatment, but then Clive Heron was not a _man_ , which was also, of course, the reason for the constraint. Otherwise, Frank tried not to reflect, it might have been an arrangement nearly ideal.

Clive supplied him with punch and a chair, and settled at the foot of it with a contained rapidity which reminded Frank of a newsreel picture of a controlled demolition. Frank mentioned _Richard of Bordeaux_ ; it transpired Clive knew the young lead.

‘Oh Clive, not another Object?’

‘Mmm, I fear so. We shall see. Downstairs at the Ritz tomorrow. The fanatics at the stage door give him handkerchiefs embroidered with white harts, you know — oh, look, the _divine_ Elisabeth. May I present you, Frank?’

But the handsome young woman was immediately surrounded, and emerged only to approach the piano — Frank, as his eyes adjusted, saw the pianist was Avery Cass—whose interpretations of Sonata à Thérèse and Appassionata had ravished him that spring.  Now he played the mildly raffish song-hits of the moment, and Elisabeth sang: her husky voice so entirely without affectation that the grace notes plangently skirted failure and the blatant internal rhymes naturalised themselves. But the music was too artless to hold Frank’s attention, and he sensed, in any case, some other claim upon it.  None of the faces on the far side of the piano seemed turned towards him, but he knew himself observed, and by no necessarily benign presence. He would not lower himself to gape about. Elisabeth bowed to applause and Nell darted over to her with kisses. Cass began to play a dance tune and couples got up. Clive patted Frank’s forearm and slipped away, skirting the dancers, anticipating even the most uncoordinated drunken lurches, impinging upon no-one’s awareness.  Frank did not expect to see Clive again for months: the long limbs had the ineluctable modality of departure, and Clive Heron’s company had all its delight from being always unsought.

Like most people whose gregariousness at parties depends on intervals of solitude Frank was usually denied them: Heron had not been gone for five minutes before Colin Mansel was waving at him across the dancefloor. Mansel was vital and amusing: the undergraduate rags his friend Freeborn sardonically referred to as his _benefit performances_ had been a leaven in college life, but his wit did not stop short of malice and his comportment was wearingly unguarded. Frank remembered arriving early for tea in Mansel and Freeborn’s set sometime during the friends' second year, and looking over the bookshelves: they revealed catholic taste and magpie intellect in at least one inmate.  Among them were Marxist tracts and some albums of moderately vicious pornography; Frank made sure he was found by an apologetic and habitually tardy Mansel imperturbably reviewing one of the latter. They had chatted innocuously enough over the fashionable teacups and hostile alliance was thereby joined. 

Frank rose minutely to Mansel’s handshake. He disbursed some trivial news; the new Provost; a pleasantry concerning Crowfoot; A.G.’s further unfortunate decline. 

‘And you, Mansel?’

‘A posting in Uttar Pradesh, beginning September.  And,’ he added with surprisingly gauche defiance, ‘I’m engaged.’

‘Congratulations.’ He named the unfortunate woman, whom Frank knew slightly and had thought possessed of more horse and common. But girls were kept so ignorant. He performed a small interrogative gesture.

‘She’s not here tonight. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, actually.’

They crossed into the other room, the one with the river of candle stubs in jamjars: chinks had started to appear in the effect as Nell had become absorbed in conversation and neglected to replace the lights. Figures stood, sat, squatted and lounged around the walls, demonically underlit by the flickering stream. The room was thick with the smells of tobacco, drink and sweat. There were several men by the table which held the punch bowl and the remainder of Nell’s always-generous dole of booze. Frank perceived from his worsted street clothes (quite good of their kind, but quite the wrong kind) which of them Mansel was approaching, and by some irrational insight, that he was also the source of the pitiless gaze he had sensed as Elisabeth sang ‘Love for Sale.’ The slim, fair young man swung about circumspectly before Mansel’s tap on the shoulder had quite descended. 

He was the candidate. He was Lanyon, R. R.

Lanyon’s look of boyish horror was quickly replaced by one of blank complaisance.

‘Oh, you two know each other,’ said Mansel.

‘No—’ said Lanyon slowly, which Frank considered was true enough, socially speaking.

‘Easy to mistake a face, in this light,’ Frank said evenly, bestowing on Mansel roughly the look he had given him two years ago over gunpowder tea in gaudy Clarice Cliff cups. But he was far from serene: Lanyon’s momentary alarm had reawakened in him a protectiveness he had felt only once before, and twenty-five years ago—a determination at all costs to preserve another person from ill-use.  This was not the dutiful care, faintly maniacal physical courage and strategic resourcefulness that had earned him the MC and a nickname revealing his company’s entire want of verbal imagination. This was high hazard, the impulse that would make a small band victorious over all the world, this was the plains of Leuctra, any implication of filth washed clean in blood, the happy warrior that every man should wish to be— _this_ —he collected himself firmly—was the inane rot he’d used all his scholarship and experience of military service to keep at bay for twenty years.  

‘Oh very well.  Best to err on the side of correctitude,’ Mansel sighed, ‘Frank Maddox—Ralph Jepson.’

Frank’s gut contracted. He saw the rationale—pick a name that will make you jump, and you shan’t be betrayed by inattention—but this was surely to take the dodge to a self-punishing extreme. The boy must be some sort of _masochist_ —he thought he saw now how it had really been, and shut a mental door, turning the key on it with a wry appreciation of that petty-bourgeois excrescence in the Christian name: nice touch. 

‘How do you do?’ They shook hands.

Mansel liked his interlocutors rattled and tongue-tied, the better to deliver a benefit performance. Frank could find it in himself to be insulted that Mansel thought he could produce this condition in him with the jejune expedient of announcing his engagement immediately before brazenly introducing an apparent bit of rent, but the alternative, that Lanyon was somehow privy to a send-up, was more unpleasant to contemplate. Frank made a remark about Avery Cass’s playing—the content indicative of some discrimination, but the tone repressive with masculine upholstery: a leather, horsehair and Afghan rug sort of a voice. Lanyon responded with, if anything, rather too much enthusiasm—but the 1st XI and intrepid democratic posturing during his summers had clearly left him no time whatsoever for the appreciation of music. Mansel ladled and handed punch, contributing gossip about a show in which the singer was shortly to appear.

‘—a placard reading _Mr Hughes-Follett’s middle leg: extra stiffening_ —’ Mansel put a finger to the corner of his eye.

‘Are you all right?’ Frank asked.

‘Quite—damn it,’ Mansell flinched, ‘I’ve grit or something in my eye—’

‘Mm. The air’s filthy. It used to drive Nell scatty when she had her main studio down here. Not to mention the floods—’

‘I say, Maddox—won’t you wipe it for me?’ Pulling the skin of his lower eyelid down grotesquely, he bent until his cheek nearly touched Frank’s.  His breath was hot and sour with more than an evening’s drink. ‘Exquisite— _enormous_ —er—capacity for discipline,’ he hissed, ‘but the novelty’s exhausted, _as_ am I. All yours if you want it.’

Shuddering, to his dismay not entirely with disgust, Frank put his hand on Mansel’s shoulder and pushed him firmly upright. ‘You should flush it out properly—rubbing will only make it worse. Nell might have an eyebath—shall I ask her?’

‘Oh, _Frank_. Such good sense. No—I’ll go myself.’  He loped off, hallooing before he was out of earshot, ‘Marsh-Downe—hi—Jim— _Jim_ — _Marsh-Downe!_ ’

‘Christ,’ Lanyon said. ‘I think I owe you—something.’

‘I feel I owe _you_ an apology, though I’m not quite sure what for. Mansel rather has that effect on one. Of course, I only know him because he was—never mind. How about some fresh air?’

Lanyon nodded gratefully. They went out into the courtyard. The boy offered a cigarette and a light, and lit one himself.

They took a silent drag or two, then both began, ‘I—look—’ almost in unison. Lanyon’s quick smile made his hard, narrow face look its age. The viscous plash of the Thames rose through the noise of the party to dominate Frank’s consciousness, until the music and voices, just a few feet away indoors, seemed distant and unreal.

‘Here, listen,’ Lanyon said, ‘that goes down to the river, doesn’t it?’  He pointed with his cigarette to the dark passage between the two studios opposite.

Frank hesitated. ‘Yes. There are only a couple of iron posts at the end, and it’s unlit—easy to lose your footing.’

‘It’s low tide,’ Lanyon replied with kindly scorn. ‘I won’t let you drown. Classical scholarship would never forgive me. Come on.’ 

Disarmed by the boy’s bossy innocence and abashed that he had let him make the first allusion to their previous meeting, Frank followed, not quite believing what he was doing. The passage was dank and slippery; it reeked of brackish decay and oil.  But that the light diffused by a feeble crescent moon remained visible, it might be a tunnel.  Before they’d gone a few yards Frank could feel the chill damp rising through the soles of his shoes, even though the night was only middling cold for late September. He recoiled from the muddy, leaching sound the water made—it grew, as they picked their way down the slope, to an insistent rush and roar that seemed to come more from within himself than the river below. To counter it he began to recite aloud:

> autar epei rh' epi nēa katēlthomen ēde thalassan,   
>  nēa men ar pamprōton erussamen eis hala dian,   
>  en d' histon tithemestha kai histia nēi melainē—

Lanyon looked back; his swift, charming grin almost cadaverous in the shadows. 

‘Hope I’m not the black sheep,’ he said. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there are those posts you mentioned, we’re nearly there.’

> —hē d' es peirath' hikane bathurroou Ōkeanoio  
>  entha de Kimmeriōn andrōn dēmos te polis te,  
>  ēeri kai nephelē kekalummenoi—

They came out onto a kind of shore composed of mud, driftwood and half-bricks. Rags of cloud hung from the moon. The night had seemed clear but the river was invisible under a grey, miasmatic vapour; its redundant slopping less overwhelming than it had been in the passage. Frank shivered: he had stood at four different putative gates of Erebus, and none of them had seemed as likely to yield a host of shades as this. A tugboat whistled in the distance. Lanyon took couple of steps further on and said, ‘Dark Cimmerian desert is about it, isn’t it? Shall we go back?’

Frank felt an absurd proprietorship. ‘L’Allegro’ was David, and him alone; this impudent boy had no right to it. But when Lanyon turned and kissed him it was as if it had happened before and they both remembered, a deep, deliberate kiss with more in it of the meeting of old lovers than the ferocity of anonymous desire.

Frank had been around enough to know that a feeling of _déjà baisé_ held no special significance. He had experienced it with men whose names he did not know; during the period after the war in which David had been inclined to accept—in fact, seemed to need—certain circumscribed demonstrations of physical love, he had not felt it with him. He broke the embrace decisively and said, ‘My dear, this really shouldn’t go any further—’

‘You want me,’ Lanyon said without fervour. ‘You should have seen yourself back there, with Colin. You looked fit to murder him.’ 

‘Mansel’s a swine.  He didn’t hurt you, did he?’

Lanyon barked a laugh. ‘Christ, no. Just the opposite.’  His face fell and then tightened into perspicacity. ‘You wanted me when I went up for the interview, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Frank said softly. It seemed to be the right answer. It was true, anyhow. 

‘Well, then,’ he said.  Frank saw him as a prefect, settling some small matter of house routine. ‘If it’s that we haven’t a place to go—I don’t really see you with a wife and brats somehow.’

Amused and moved at the possibility that had not occurred to the boy—he supposed it lay rather outside his ken—Frank agreed, ‘No, not my style. Nor is picking up—’

‘Rent?’

‘I was going to say _strays_.  You’ve nowhere to sleep tonight, have you?’

‘There was a dosshouse in Dean Street—before Colin. I paid a week in advance, but I scarcely suppose they’ve been thoughtful enough to keep my bed for me.’

‘I’ll put you up for tonight. Have you things at Mansel’s flat?’

‘Yes. I can handle him.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ 

Frank’s leg had seized up: he took a sharp breath at the effort it cost him to get it moving again.

‘What a little shit I am, dragging you down here. I’m sorry.’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for rubies. I mean that, and all of it.’

Lanyon moderated his pace naturally to Frank’s, without impatience or condescension. A welcome steadying hand up the steep slick between the mud flat and the iron railings was wordlessly provided, and the moment they reached the relative safety of the middle of the passage, the courtyard in sight, tactfully dropped.

After the mirky silence of the riverside, the party seemed impossibly tinny and clangorous.  The collective mood had reached the giddy pitch of infinite possibility that precedes either pranks or philosophising; always a good time to contrive an unobtrusive exit, Frank thought, bidding goodbye to Nell.  Lanyon, hatless and overcoatless, was not an advantage in successfully hailing a cab, but they eventually secured a driver whose unfastidiousness was explained by his continual stream of innuendo to take them to the flat in Oakley Street.

_A few more months_ , Frank thought as he poured Lanyon a glass of brandy, _and he’ll have become what he’s pretending to be_. His personal appearance was neat, but bore marks of privation: his last shave had been with a blade which had not been sharp for some time; his clothes had been hung but not recently cleaned or pressed; he had walked too far in those shoes and now they had a coating of Thames mud, removed, they revealed narrow feet in socks bobbled with novice darning. He was, for the moment, almost insupportably touching and provoking, but by the year’s turn the cagey self-assertion would have become brittle and vulpine. He already looked out of place in David’s sitting-room; wary and cynical where stuffed bookshelves, friendly old furniture and well-worn curtains and rugs, stacks of periodicals and ill-assorted ornament invited generosity and ease. That ought to be helped, Frank thought, by the reassurance that he should spend a chaste night in his own bed, but he found himself curiously slow to give it. _Maddox is not_ , he jeered inwardly, _quite become a saint_.  Lanyon folded himself into the corner of the sofa, one leg tucked under him, his right arm spread along the back.  He touched his collar repeatedly and nervously with his left hand. Glossy purplish welts and traces of scab, beginning below the knuckle of his little finger and extending nearly to his cuff marred an extraordinarily fine, strong mould. Frank sat down at the other end of the sofa.

‘I spend most weekends here,’ he explained, in response to Lanyon’s query. ‘But it belongs to my friend—’ under the appraising look, it felt like an abuse of the good old English word, though in what way he could not conceive, ‘David—David Blaize.’ 

‘Good Lord, _really_? I remember reading _Frederic Edwardes_ when I was at private school.  I must have been ten, eleven. Took me another three or four years to work out why I liked it so much, and by then I was inclined to regard it as a nice idea that didn’t exist anywhere in the world.’

‘I shouldn’t usually be here alone—but David’s visiting his father and sister.  Help yourself, by the way,’ he said, indicating the sandalwood cigarette box on the coffee-table in front of them.

‘Thanks—oh, _God_ ,’ he said over the unlit cigarette, ‘how impossibly dense of me. It’s _you_ , isn’t it? I mean, you’re James Brook.’ 

 Frank offered a light and leaned back. ‘Mm. I think the coves in the lit. papers say _provides the original_. My batting average was decidedly less spectacular.  And that schoolboy cynic was right, up to a point. I mean, as a matter of fact it does exist in life, but it’s a deal less easy and simple than in fiction. Which is far from universally so.  Most novelists are such complicators, inventing scruples where they needn’t be.’

‘I think that’s why I don’t read novels any more. I prefer reality.’ Lanyon glanced at him through pale lashes, capricious, intimate and would-be experienced. Frank would have liked to be able to say he found the effect wholly anaphrodisiac. 

‘As long as you don’t confuse it with squalor.’

‘Bit tricky for me just at the moment, don’t you think?’ 

Frank conceded the point with an inclination of his head. ‘Look, Lanyon. There’s no pleasant way to say this. Your housemaster—former housemaster—wrote to me.’ 

Lanyon made a small throaty noise and took a large mouthful of brandy. 

‘Yes, that was more or less my reaction too. I imagine you don’t want to dwell on it, or what’s happened since. But I don’t want to hold anything that feels like an advantage over you, do you see?’

‘Yes. Thank you. That letter was probably a fairly sickening read. But the material facts of the case were likely much as he told them.  Not much imagination, old Jeepers, just a dirty mind. One thing was a lie, about the final episode with the other boy. I daresay you can guess what that was. But even that doesn’t matter now—I mean, it’s not untrue any more.’ 

‘That’s needlessly self-castigating, my dear. You’ve not been in a position to choose freely.’ 

‘I had a choice. I just didn’t have the strength to make it.’

‘Comes down to the same thing in the end. One can’t do what’s not in one’s capacity. But tell me the whole story if it will help. Another?’

‘Yes, please.’ Lanyon untucked his foot and slumped, pushing his hands into his pockets and looking straight ahead. ‘I’d planned to go straight to Southampton from school. I knew a man who could fix me up with a ship. But I persuaded myself that I had to face my parents, that it would be creeping out of things not to. Of course I was hoping to be received—well, not _quite_ as the prodigal. So I went home—Kings’ Lynn, if you care. The maid let me in.  I was about to walk through to the drawing-room when she—she showed me into a little reception room, that my father used sometimes for informal business meetings—I’m sorry, I should have said, he’s a vintner. It was so absolutely preposterous that I found myself going along with it. I waited for about five minutes, and then my father came in. He told me his son was dead, and I was a stranger in his house. Well, that had my mother’s stamp all over it—her people were Plymouth Brethren—and I told him so. But he stuck with it, in a horrid, dead flat voice. I’m afraid I raved rather, but that just made his replies the more automatic. I think he actually was in shock. Perhaps I was too. Suddenly I didn’t see the point in pushing it any more. I asked if I could have half an hour to pack a bag, and I’d leave straight away. He became quite human then, and I went up to my bedroom, put some things in a duffle bag. He let me out of the scullery door and tried to palm me five pounds. I shoved it back hard enough to knock him down. I’ve been in couple of spots since where five pounds might’ve come in handy.’

He sounded as if he were giving evidence from a prepared statement, Frank thought, at the same moment realizing with an obscure horror that there was no _as if_ about it. 

‘I missed the man and the ship. I didn’t know him well anyway. I tried to pick up day labour, but it was hopeless, I’ve the wrong accent, for a start. And really you have to know someone who will get you in. I was feeling the squeeze a bit when I fell in with an old Lascar, and he got me a situation kitchen-portering in a rather shabby hotel. Did that for just over six weeks. I learnt a few things. The main one being that respectable poverty is a pretty fiction. I mean if you try to keep to yourself, be careful with money, you’ll be shunned. No-one will have your back when things go awry. And things go awry every day. And if you don’t twig what it is you do then, you’ll become a Jonah: people will go out of their way to trip you. Out on your ear by luncheon. What you _do_ is get your wages, treat everyone, get blind, pawn your coat to pay the landlady, and eat bread and dripping the rest of the week. But then I really overdid it, came in late, which I might have got away with, and was found by the housekeeper puking my guts up into a mop-bucket, which I didn’t. I went on a bit of a bender with my last pay-packet, and somewhere around the middle of that I found out there was something that I could do for cash that didn’t require a character or involve soda crystals. One fellow asked me up to London, and I didn’t see why not. And then I did, just in time. Got out of that one over a ten-foot wall at the back of a pub. It was topped with broken glass, and if it hadn’t been for a café nippy who’d done a year’s training at St Thomas’s before getting the boot for slipping out to meet her bloke I’d probably be dead of blood poisoning by now.’

He held out his hand to display the scars.

‘Anyway, that’s it. I’ve just been knocking about ever since. As cautionary tales go, it’s not even very lurid. I didn’t know iniquity entailed so many cups of cold tea in the Lyons restaurant on Coventry Street.’ 

Lanyon took another cigarette from the box. His face was peaky and drawn, worn about the edges. Frank tried to guess how much worse it had actually been: he imagined that, like himself, Lanyon found insalubrity a deal easier to bear than uncertainty. He made a gesture of helpless compassion. 

‘You must be very tired. You can take my bedroom. I’ll sleep in David’s.’ 

Lanyon frowned, befuddled. The long speech seemed to have used the last of his energy, and he was in any case probably pretty tight. Lord knows how much he’d drunk at the party and before. He was the sort, Frank considered, to remain lucid right up until an abrupt collapse. 

‘There _is_ no spare room,’ Frank added, ‘I’m not being demure.’  

‘It really exists in life,’ he said, thick-tongued, his tone pitched uncertainly between derision and wonderment. 

‘Up to a point, particularly where I’m concerned. I don’t think anyone’s proposing my canonisation, not even David. But you’ve read his novel. You know almost all there is to know.’

Lanyon gave one of his queer, Etruscan smiles. ‘I used to wish I had a friend like Brook. But I shouldn’t have bolted from him. Or strung him along.’

‘Please don’t be difficult, my dear.’

‘Aren’t you inventing scruples where there needn’t be any? You want me, and you’re not getting what you need at home. If _he_ doesn’t want—he can hardly resent—’  

‘Oh, Lanyon, shut up, do,’ Frank said warmly. ‘You’re talking like a tart. Don’t you ever think about what _you_ want?’ He paused, thinking perhaps he’d been too harsh. ‘If the answer really is a middle-aged minor authority on Asclepian inscription at Pergamon with an incipient paunch and a game leg—motorbike crash, by the way, though it was _during_ the war—then I take it all back, of course.’ 

Lanyon looked down into his glass, the corners of his mouth twitching. ‘I do. Think about it, I mean. Quite often. But it’s useless now. I thought I would have been interfering in—someone’s development and by the time I realised I might be wrong it was far too late.’ 

‘So you took what you knew you could have without having to ask, or barely.’ Frank made a tight moue of recognition. ‘And you worked up a justification for it being virtue—I mean in the Roman sense—because love is frenzy and danger, and this was, on your side at least, an affair of sanity—of convenience and solidarity.’ 

‘Spot on. I’m impressed,’ he said woodenly, grinding out his cigarette.

‘I might have been you, Ralph.’

‘You weren’t, though, were you? Which, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, means you understand rather less than nothing about it.’

‘Excused. And you’re perfectly right, of course.  My love was recognised, and returned, and it saved me—if that sounds rather Edwardian it’s because it _is_.’  

Lanyon snorted a laugh that had less scorn in it than Frank could possibly have expected or hoped.

‘But I was the proximate cause of a case not unlike—well, one expression of unreserve deserves another.’  He poured them both another drink. ‘Our housemaster—Adams—was most unlike your Jepson. He let the prefects run everything; a sound principle, as far as it goes, but he let it go too far. There was a good deal of traffic and I was—’

‘Piccadilly Circus?’

‘ _Really_. So young and so untender! But yes, as you said yourself, _spot on_. I had an attachment—a fond one—to a boy called Hughes, a couple of years junior to me. He’d been at the same prepper as David, and when David came to Marchester—well, I suppose he sought, naturally enough, to replicate the thing for himself. Have you ever seen red?  Literally, I mean.’

‘I think so. Once.’

‘Most odd. Like being in your own bloodstream. Well, I did. I discovered Hughes sitting on David’s bed in earnest exegesis of irrumation. I could have dashed his brains out, though I confined myself to summary ejection by the scruff of his neck, and rearranged the dormitories the next day. I was jealous, of course. But more than that: I simply couldn’t abide the thought that someone might molest David, corrupt him. _Someone_ very much including _me_. Peculiar thing, that possessive fury. I got through the war without ever feeling it again, and I thought until tonight it belonged to one situation and condition alone. For what that might be worth to you.’

Lanyon took off his jacket, folded it on the arm of the sofa and crept shyly along the seat. The boy was painfully avid for affection, Frank thought; it was less of a risk to give it to him than it was cruelty to withhold it. He banked a cushion against his left thigh and put another in his lap. Lanyon raised an eyebrow at the latter before settling his head on it.  Frank stroked the fine, straight hair, fascinated by the uneven knobs and ridges of the skull beneath. 

‘I let Hughes hang himself,’ he continued, ‘I saw what went on, and except for keeping David from it, I did nothing. And then Hughes was caught—an intercepted letter—and expelled. I deplored it and did yet more nothing. I was wrapped up in David—in my work, and games, yes—but chiefly in David. I told myself I had atoned by protecting him, and when that didn’t work, that a confession would make me sound like a maniac, one of those who flood the police-stations when a poor trollop’s found strangled with her own stockings.’

‘What happened to Hughes?’ 

‘Passed into Sandhurst, eventually. Killed at Krithia in ’15.’

‘I’m sorry. It sounds as if he got back on his feet, though. It wouldn’t have helped him if you’d been cashiered too.’ 

‘Not the point, is it?’

‘No. Especially not at about three in the morning. What time is it, anyway?’

‘About three in the morning. Do you want to go to bed?’ 

‘I rather like it here, if you don’t mind for a bit.  Am I leaning on your leg frightfully?’

‘I like it too. I’ll give you a good shove if it starts to hurt, don’t worry.’

Within a few minutes he was asleep, though lightly. His young face held its firm contours in repose. Frank resisted the temptation to touch his tumbled hair.  A rug that Frank’s mother had crocheted for David was thrown over the back of the sofa; its subtle scheme of beige, pale blue and olive green wool had never suited its recipient’s clubroom taste in decor, but drawn down over Lanyon’s spare shoulders it looked at home.  

Frank wanted to shield him from every harm, and knew he could not, that he must release him in the morning to sordid banality. Frank’s social contacts had been essentially conventional for many years; he knew nobody who might be both willing and able to help. The superficial eccentricity of the guests at Nell Crayshaw’s parties was no good at all; what was needed was a more profound irregularity, the sort that went abroad clad in the serge of respectability and committed every sin in the Decalogue, the fixer class that greased the cogs of Empire, the Jack Horners who had their thumbs in every pie and could always pull out a plum. That world would absorb Lanyon without a murmur, and he would be useful to it, mitigating its philistinism and meanness. Or there might be another war. 

Lanyon wriggled, making a tiny satisfied grunt. Frank’s leg was tingling; before it went numb there would be jags and stabs of discomfort, but he knew he would not move; there was brandy for that. He gave himself up to a wanton melancholy: it was enough, perhaps, that for a few hours no ill should come near the boy; no insult touch him, that he should rest contented within the compass of a faithless arm. Ringing through almost a lifetime’s lackadaisical attendance at school and college chapel, most of it tinted by a paganism equally desultory, came the sonorities of a fervent, terrifying, divine imprudence, the entire recklessness of sanctity. _Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof._

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Cole Porter's song 'Love for Sale'.
> 
> My implicit pairing of Nell Crayshaw and Clara Batchelor reflects my dislike of the Richard Crayshaw/Clara Batchelor romance rather than anything I think particularly plausible, though I think Nell's much more sympathetic than her ghastly brother, and if Clara had any sense...
> 
> I take Clive Heron's assertion of 'not [being] a man' literally, and assume Clive a genderqueer individual who, offered an invidious binary, uses a masculine given name and pronoun.
> 
> Frank's reminiscence about Mansel's porn collection is stolen from an anecdote told by Robert Birley about Guy Burgess. Frank handles the situation with a bit more élan. 
> 
> Frank quotes the opening of _Odyssey_ , book XI, in which Odysseus travels to the land of the dead. I've left it in untranslated, transliterated Greek for effect. Ralph refers to Odysseus's sacrifice of a black ram and ewe, the blood of which is poured with other offerings into a trench to attract the shades of the dead.
> 
> This fic has a [divergent ending](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3109001), in which Maddox is less of a saint. It doesn't change things much, but please mind the tags.


End file.
